YOU didn’t need to be a behavioural therapist to recognise the late middle-aged woman in the elegant suit and somewhat out-of-place nuclear red hair was getting right up her husband’s nose.

To hazard a guess, the monologue of moans and catalogue of complaints started soon after leaving home in their Mercedes and continued unabated to the Water Eaton park-and-ride. After first complaining their bus was not waiting, she directed her disgust – and a forefinger – at the over-shadowing grain silo.

“They still haven’t painted over that four-letter word,” she said. “It is outrageous in a city like Oxford. We wouldn’t tolerate it in Bishop’s Cleeve.” (For the geographically challenged, that’s near Cheltenham.) Her husband suggested the silo, and its offensive word were nothing at all to do with the city, but she dismissed this as nit-picking, before restoring her critical tongue to the buses.

“What’s keeping it?” she asked. Her husband shrugged.

This was the cue for a serious-looking man in a dark suit and holding a smart brief case.

“It’s probably the ash cloud from the Icelandic volcano,” he said, his voice grave, although he cast a sly wink in the husband’s direction, who acknowledged it with the hint of a smile.

Thrown by this unsolicited reply, she returned to the ‘disgusting and tone-lowering’ four-letter word. It was safer ground.

As if by magic, the bus swept in. She chose the lower deck; her husband followed.

Those who were physically able, headed aloft.

WELL, she’s been and gone and done it. I said it was unthinkable, and there’s egg on the Unsworth features. How could she?

In spite of bookmakers offering attractive odds, 90-year-old, Peggy Barson, MBE, for 71 years the ever-steady backbone of the New Theatre box office, retires on Tuesday. Most of us thought she’d ‘chicken out’. She had threatened to retire more times than Sinatra made comebacks, even now postponing her D-day from March to the end of May.

Accusing her of being a quitter, incapable of holding down a job, only raised a chuckle. Her excuse? She had a large garden to look after at her Radley home, and there were regular meals to prepare for her elderly friends – who, it turns out, are years younger than she!

I’m off to buy a workman’s helmet. The New Theatre’s very fabric is surely in danger now its most enduring pillar is removing herself. You can’t be too careful.

FINALLY, and on a totally different note, I invariably scan the personal columns of the Oxford Mail. I did on Tuesday – and wept.

Hope and Lilly May were the twin daughters of Sean and Emma. They lived for only a day. The funeral was yesterday.

My thoughts are with Sean and Emma at this lousy time. Life can be cruel and damned unfair.